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Transient Advantage

My colleague, Ryan P. McManus, is at CES this week and is much in demand for his perspective on why digital is so disruptive. He traces the evolution of digital from its 4G impact on consumer products and media through its current impact on business models. For a more detailed explanation, have a look at…

It’s ironic – Whole Foods did a great job of teaching all of us that natural and organic are desirable. And for about 30 years, that created a strong, high-margin position for them in the competition to put dinner on your table. Now, though, as I discuss in my recent newsletter, competitors have matched them…

For some time, I’ve suggested that law schools provide a cautionary tale for the rest of us. With many graduates loaded down with big debt and with few prospects for taking jobs that actually require the degree, some schools are beginning to think the unthinkable – should they consider closing? They may not have…

Yahoo and its CEO of three years, Marissa Mayer, have been in the news a lot lately. While Yahoo’s checkered history and frequent changes in leadership have not done the company’s reputation any favors, it still has assets that could be valuable. With investors becoming impatient, Yahoo is apparently in play in a big way. Fortune…

In my most recent newsletter, I suggested that businesses would do well to anticipate the consequences of a valuation bubble bursting in Silicon Valley with so many private companies valued at more than a billion dollars, with few signs that the investor spigot is going to turn off anytime soon. I ran across this great…

As someone who has spent much of my life watching organizations fall victim to what I call the ‘transient advantage‘ economy, I’ve always been puzzled that despite its obvious importance, large organizations do a lot more talking about innovation than actually doing it. When you dig a little deeper, what quickly becomes clear is that most…

In this insightful blog post, Steve Sokol runs through the pluses and minuses of being part of a startup within a large corporation, what he calls a “virtual startup.” The pluses are many – a salary, funding and office space among them. There are also some minuses – having to play nicely with corporate systems…

It’s gratifying to see that the ideas in The End of Competitive Advantage are starting to get traction in various parts of the world. Clicking on the links below should take you to the site for the appropriate language: Japanese Portugese Turkish (thanks to one of my twitter followers for this! Still working on getting…

It’s been five or more years since the Great recession walloped economies all over the world, with the result that for many companies it has been a time of doing not very much but cost-cutting, downsizing, divesting and otherwise holding on to what business they can by their fingernails. Now, as things are slowly starting…

In an insightful blog that is part of a series HBR is running on the intersection between Strategy and Innovation, editor Sarah Cliffe interviews colleague Don Sull, who argues that you can think of the “sustainability” school as the thesis, the “transient advantage” camp as the antithesis and the organizational change folks as the synthesis…